Gaming App Of The Day: Endless Slashing In God Of Blades On Your iPad

I loved Conan comics as a kid. Every swordfight the Cimmerian had with another warrior ratcheted up an incredible amount of tension in my teenage heart. It's not that I ever thought about Conan losing. Rather, it was the idea that so much depended on the steel and sinews of Robert E. Howard's famous barbarian. Whole civilizations would crumble if Conan was found to be lacking in mettle.

The main character in God of Blades doesn't talk, but the iOS game delivers that same sense of epic urgency.

White Whale Games' action title mashes together the automatic movement of a Canabalt-style infinite runner with the swipe-and-tap combat of games like Infinity Blade. It may sound like such a pairing wouldn't add up to anything special, but it does here. The Nameless King -- a dead monarch re-awakened by cosmic entities -- automatically advances from left to right towards a procession of enemies. Four simple moves -- upward, downward and sideways slashes, along with a parry -- are all you have to beat back the hordes trying to destroy you.

A parry will hold back the player character's steps a bit while a spinning swing will preserve his momentum. There's a surprising amount of strategy to be found in pacing the rhythm of your attacks and you definitely can't spam your way through victory.

God of Blades oozes style from every pixel, too. Both the psychedelic backdrops and trippy soundtrack could be ripped from those prog-rock albums that Fahey loves so much. And the ominous tone of pulp fantasy is lovingly recreated in the text and fake soft book cover images peppered through the game.

I wasn't sure God of Blades was going to hit my sweet spot when I first heard about it, but it cuts its way to a clever hybridization that kept me coming back for more.

WATCH MORE: Tech News

Comments

Getting my iPad 3 next week.. looking for some really decent "HD" games. There's that flying one that is meant to be good and 2 games (Ravensword 2 and Infinity Blade: Dungeons) on the horizon.. but I want some that are good "now"..

The google searches I've done to try and find the "best" iPad 3 games that make use of the new screen resolution haven't turned up anything beyond these three games..

If graphic quality is what you're after in particular, then Galaxy On Fire 2 is pretty good. Lili is also excellent. Both have pretty good gameplay as well. GOF2 is particularly deep - it's effectively Privateer.

is someone at kotaku perhaps friends with the developer? because the klunky, awkward, poorly animated and incredibly basic gameplay i see in the trailer does not line up with kotakus coverage and praise... what am i missing here?

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